Did you know you can help health researchers to prevent disease from the comfort of your own sofa? 

When you sign up to Our Future Health, we ask that you fill in a questionnaire about your health and lifestyle. According to Prof Michael Cook, Chief Science Officer at Our Future Health, over 2 million people have already completed the questionnaire. In doing so, they’ve provided health researchers with a formidable tool for their work. 

“The questionnaire provides a unique snapshot,” explains Michael. “It captures the habits, daily symptoms, and social factors that shape a person’s health.”

“For researchers, that information could be vital. They can analyse answers from different groups of people and search for patterns that explain how, where and why different diseases begin and develop.

“In the fight against common diseases like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the questionnaire makes a tremendous difference.”

What does the questionnaire ask – and why? 

Our health and lifestyle questionnaire typically takes about 30 to 45 minutes to complete. Your answers save in chunks as you go, so you don’t have to complete the questionnaire in one sitting.

It is divided into five sections. These cover:

• you and your household 
• your work and education 
• your lifestyle 
• your family health history 
• your health history 

“Within these sections, there are 68 core questions, some of which lead into further ‘gateway questions’” explains Michael. “For example, if you say you’re a smoker, there will be additional questions to answer about how much you smoke.”

Michael emphasises the incredible value of completed questionnaires – even if volunteers aren’t able to immediately attend an Our Future Health clinic to provide a blood sample. “The questionnaire alone can give researchers an incredibly rich picture of health that can’t be attained anywhere else. 

“Researchers get vital information on lifestyle factors that we know influence long-term health, including things like how much sleep someone gets, how often they socialise, even their daily screen use. They also get more traditional factors like height, weight, and alcohol consumption.

“By combining these details with a volunteer’s family health history, we can more accurately predict who may be at higher risk of a given disease.

“Take the example of type 2 diabetes. We know that age, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol can all have a role to play in raising someone’s risk of getting the disease. But if we add in to that model factors like where you live, your family history, genetics and sleep patterns, researchers may be able to significantly boost the accuracy of our predictions.  

“Once we have a better picture of who is more likely to get a disease, doctors can offer early and targeted help to people at risk. It could lead to better health outcomes in the future.”

Why are there questions about income? 

As you progress through the questionnaire, you might wonder why we ask certain things, like your household’s income. Michael explains that these questions aren’t about being nosy – they’re trying to understand the hidden factors that influence health across the UK.

“In order to understand all the things that can cause diseases across a population of people, we need to get a detailed picture of what’s happening to each individual person. In this case, financial circumstances are associated with many health-related aspects of our lives, such as how much time we have to exercise, what type of food we can afford, and how much sleep between work and living we can squeeze in. Without that kind of detail, we can’t power new discoveries that will have a positive effect on the whole population.”

“I know it can feel uncomfortable to reveal personal details about yourself. Should you choose, you can always skip a question that you prefer not to answer. However, I want to assure everybody that the information volunteers share with Our Future Health is de-identified prior to any registered researcher being granted access. It means we can facilitate scientific analysis in a secure and confidential manner.

“The great benefit of the financial information is that it helps researchers to make new discoveries that reduce inequalities in healthcare. For example, by analysing health information from people whose households have a lower income, they can begin to understand the needs of that population and how to help.

“We want healthcare to work equally well for everyone in society. With the answers you provide in your questionnaire, you can help researchers to build that future.”

What if my answers change? 

Our questionnaire paints a picture of a volunteer’s health and wellbeing on the day they provided their answers. Those answers will never go ‘out of date’, because they will always show the many factors that shaped that person’s health at one specific moment in time. 

“In the future, we may get in touch to ask volunteers some of the same questions again, to see how factors like body weight, exercise, and location have changed,” says Michael. “It would allow researchers to track how people’s health has evolved over time, so that they can find more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection, and treatment of diseases.

“But I want to emphasise that the data volunteers provide just by completing one questionnaire is extremely powerful. I want to thank everyone who’s already done it – 2 million people is an incredible amount. And I want to say to others, if you want to contribute to the health of our children and grandchildren, then please go to our website, read our participant materials and consider consenting to be part of Our Future Health. Your participation is important and will help us meet the health challenges of future generations.” 

A researcher’s view 

One person who can speak directly to the value of our questionnaire data is Professor Daniel Smith, Head of the Division of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh. Daniel is a health researcher who worked on the first published study using our data, which revealed that people living with chronic inflammatory conditions may have almost double the risk of mental health issues compared to others.

“In this study, we used a lot of data from the questionnaire completed by Our Future Health volunteers, specifically personal, sociodemographic, health, and lifestyle information,” he says. “This included self-reported diagnoses for a range of things, including autoimmune and psychiatric disorders.

“Large and diverse samples like the one Our Future Health is building are absolutely critical for conducting evidence-based research that can be applied to the whole population.

“The answers given in the questionnaire when someone joins Our Future Health are extremely important for us as researchers, because they can be used to assess how certain characteristics might predict the emergence of new mental and physical health disorders over time.

“I don’t think we could have done our study without this valuable source of information.”